[brokenmachine]

I contend that doing a course or learning how a computer works at a fundamental level is a skill just like touchtyping that will remain even into the next generation of phones.

For example we bought my gf's mother a smartphone and she has a very limited understanding of what the difference between her plan data and storage on the phone is, which causes a lot of confusion.

She uses it mostly to take photos which eventually filled up the storage on her phone, so she became unable to send or receive photos from her children.

She was confused by the error messages coming up that the phone storage was full and thought they meant that she had used up her phone plan data. Because of her limited understanding of how it works, she was unable to deduce that those two things might be connected, so she was expecting the phone to become properly functional again at the end of the month when her plan data resets.

That's just the first example that comes to mind, but there have been many others.

[kwxza]

A good analogy she may grok easily could be comparing her plan data to her water usage and comparing her phone storage to the kitchen sink.

The sink can only hold so much water at once, but she can use more/less water each month than the sink can hold. If the sink is full, she has to drain some water to be able to add more. Also, if she uses too much water, she may be charged more than she was expecting.

I've explained storage vs data this way to a few people and it seems to have been useful.

[boomlinde]

> I contend that doing a course or learning how a computer works at a fundamental level is a skill just like touchtyping that will remain even into the next generation of phones.

While I agree with exactly what you're saying here, I don't think Apple's UX choices pertain at all to how a computer works at a fundamental level. Even changes between OS and software revisions have upended what I thought I'd learned about it, which is entirely dissimilar from using a keyboard where you can literally just look down at your hands if you forget where your hands are or if you are using a new layout.

As far as hand held computers go, using a Palm V was much easier and more comparable to a keyboard in the sense that I had to internalize the Graffiti alphabet. Once that was done, every setting and system application on the thing was clearly laid out in consistent forms and modal dialogs, with the input working consistently across all applications. You didn't have to coerce it into marking text instead of magnifying, and its analogue to iTunes wasn't a backpack-sized Swiss army knife.

I know how a computer works at a fundamental level, but whenever I have to use iTunes to manage the data on my phone I'm in for a googlefest. You don't need some cargo cult residing on an Apple user forum to give you various more or less outdated opinions on where the tilde key is located on the keyboard if you happen to forget. I could probably tell you on a pretty detailed level how MP3 works, but to this day I haven't figured out how to get songs off my iPhone to the PC.

Meanwhile, I've had phones and MP3 players that I could just connect with USB and they'd show up as mass storage devices with a regular file system. Perfectly intuitive no-nonsense approach compared to launching iTunes once a year only to learn that they've completely reworked the thing so that you can now only enable uploading plain MP3 recordings by checking some obscure checkbox hidden away in a dialog accessible from a menu.

To be fair, the trivial features I typically use on a daily basis all seem very intuitive and accessible, but any slight step off the path Apple has laid out for you is always a pain in the ass, which in my experience holds true for OS X to an even greater extent. Often it's not hard, but unergonomic and esoteric. Often, as is the case with managing music on the thing, there is an obvious alternative that would be much more user friendly.